They should make an MMO Farming Sim

By, Omer Altay
Okay here’s an idea. Get this, an MMO farming simulator. I mean come on, who doesn’t love those fun Harvest Moon games that Natsume keeps churning out every year. Well, at least the 2D ones, most of the 3D Harvest Moon games tend to suck, with Harvest Moon 64 being the exception. I’m seriously surprised that there are no farming simulation MMOs out there yet, as there are so many whacky Free MMOs on the market that you’d imagine someone would have made a farming MMO. Just look at Racing Star: Come on Baby. It’s a baby themed kart racing game; how weird is that? There’s also a Shot Online which is a golfing MMO and Ace Online which is a Star Fox like aerial combat game. The fact is since there are a lot of creative MMOs out there, you’d imagine there would be at least one farming MMO, but unfortunately not.

A baby themed racing game is just weird.

I bet a lot of readers are probably thinking ‘Who the heck would playing a farming simulator?’, but the fact is there is a huge market for it, as just try and count how many Harvest Moon games there are on the market. Seriously, just try counting them, I bet you can’t because The company behind Harvest Moon, Natsume, pretty much just churns out a dozen or so remakes of the same farming simulator and repackages it as a new game and people keep buying it. Just about every console and hand held system has a Harvest Moon game today. Natsume wouldn’t keep making these dang Harvest Moon games is no one played them so there is clearly a market for it.

How would it work you ask? Well simple. Ever player in the MMO would have their own plot of land, sort of like the actual Harvest Moon games and since this is an MMO each player’s farm would be its own ‘instance’. That’s really the only way I could imagine it working, because if there were to be a persistent world, it would have to be enormous to support thousands of farms at once and without instanced farms, players would just harass each others crops and farm animals with a sickle or something. Players could interact outside of their farm in the game’s town square where they can also purchase seeds, new tools and upgrade their farms. Crops could also be sold in the

I obviously don’t have all the details figured out, but it would certainly be interesting to see a game developer launch a farm simulator MMO. Another reason I’d like to see a farming MMO is because I’m tired of playing the same type of game over and over. There are seriously a dozen or so MMO shooters and most of them are unusually similar. Sure there a few great MMO Shooters like S4 League and Combat Arms but for every good one there are easily three mediocre ones. Unfortunately, this applies for a lot of other MMO Genres as well, like racing and rhythm games because there are easily a dozen or so racing MMOs, but only a handful of them are actually good games. I’d like to see MMO developers and publishers innovate a bit, and a farming MMO would certainly be innovative.